Schmidt, Arno

German author Arno Schmidt (b. 1914) was the author of nine novels, six volumes of stories, and various other reviews, articles, and radio essays. Schmidt also translated 22 volumes from English into German, including works by William Faulkner, Wilkie Collins, James Fenimore Cooper, James Joyce, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Edgar Allan Poe. He is considered to be one of Germany’s most difficult authors. Today, there exist four literary journals dedicated to Schmidt, one of which also publishes book volumes with scholarly research, a yearbook, an Arno Schmidt internet forum as well as French and Anglo-American internet websites. The Arno Schmidt bibliography compiled by Karl-Heinz Müther contains more than 13,000 entries. His work has been translated into 25 languages.

Schmidt was born on 18 January 1914 in Hamburg. In 1928, after the death of his father, a police officer, his mother moved the family to Silesia where Schmidt passed his high school graduation examination and worked in a textile factory in Greiffenberg. In 1937 Schmidt married Alice Murawski, who died in 1983. After his serving in the German army during World War II and time spent as a PoW in Belgium, the Schmidts lived in Cordingen, then later in small towns in the Rhineland-Palatinate and Darmstadt. They remained impoverished for many years after the war and depended on food and supply parcels from his sister Lucie in the United States and some loyal friends and admirers in West Germany. Their financial situation slowly improved after they settled in the hamlet of Bargfeld. Prior to his belated literary debut in 1949 at the age of 35 with the prose collection Leviathan, Schmidt had written juvenilia not intended for publication. This early work has as a common theme: strategies of escape from his petty-bourgeois upbringing, his life as an accountant in a textile factory, and his years in the German Wehrmacht.

Schmidt’s post-war themes and topics range from the fate of Eastern German refugees after the war and stories set in classical times to novels with dystopian post-nuclear holocaust scenarios, and works that reflect his reading of Freud and James Joyce such as his magnum opus, Zettel’s Traum [Bottom’s Dream, 1970] and the literary semi-autobiography Abend mit Goldrand [Evening Edged in Gold, 1975]. In the 1950s, Schmidt explicated his formal innovations in three essays Berechnungen I-III [Calculations I-III]. In Berechnungen I he explores a pointillist writing technique which reproduces our experience of time, not as an epic flow but as short-term memory functioning like a sieve that allows only selective remembrances. The novels Brand’s Haide [Brand’s Heath, 1950], Schwarze Spiegel [Dark Mirrors, 1951], Aus dem Leben eines Fauns [Scenes from the Life of a Faun, 1953] and Das steinerne Herz [The Stony Heart, 1956] are composed with this idea in mind. Another of Schmidt’s prose forms, called “photo album”, attempts to reproduce long-term memory functions with the intent to trigger the reader’s memory to establish identity between one’s past experience and the present reading process.

Around 1960, Schmidt began to develop poetic concepts which he named “multi-column books”, in which pages were divided into two, three, or four columns with parallel plots developed at different time levels. For example, a typical page in the typescript Zettel?s Traum [Bottom’s Dream, 1970] is devised as a three-column page in which the single plot takes place within exactly 24 hours. Two of Schmidt’s texts from the 1950s, Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas (1955) and Das steinerne Herz (1956) created much public controversy. He was taken to court for having published “blasphemic and pornographic material”, in the 1950s a legally punishable offense in West Germany. Only a written affidavit by Hermann Kasack, at that time the president of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, confirming that this text was of artistic quality prevented a verdict. In the wake of this legal action, the publisher of Schmidt’s novel Das steinerne Herz insisted on censoring many political and erotic passages. The original text was never published during Schmidt’s lifetime. The verve of his social and political anger subsided after his move to Bargfeld, where he published yet another dystopian novel, Kaff auch Mare Crisium (1960). The narrative strands of the novel are interwoven, set in two opposing columns on each page. The parallel texts are rich in allusions to apocalyptic scenarios and reflect Schmidt’s pessimistic view of human and historical progress.

In 1970, after five years of uninterrupted labor, he published Zettel’s Traum. The book is a psychoanalytical investigation into the reception process of Poe’s nineteenth-century work for readers in the second part of the twentieth century. The book is divided into three columns. The left column belongs to Edgar Allan Poe, the middle to the actual plot of the day, and the right one is reserved for associations and mind games. In 1975, Schmidt published Abend mit Goldrand, his last completed work. It is a book of retrospection as well as an insight into Schmidt’s feeling of impending doom. Schmidt died three years later on 3 June 1979 in Celle, leaving the typescript Julia unfinished.

Citation: Excerpted and adapted from Menke, Timm. "Arno Schmidt". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 August 2009 [ http://www.litencyc.com/php/s<wbr>people.php?rec=true&UID=12604</wbr>, accessed 08 June 2011.]

From the guide to the Arno Schmidt Collection, 1950-1983, (Portland State University Library)